


Poem to a Horse

by tvsn



Series: H+S [5]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Deleted Scenes, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 16:11:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12136176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvsn/pseuds/tvsn
Summary: A deleted scene from Hide and Seek in which Simcoe confronts Hewlett about the horse that he killed as a yonger man.





	Poem to a Horse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rapid_apathy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapid_apathy/gifts).



> Set in the early evening of Thursday, 3. March, between chapters 22 and 23. I posted this on one of my side blogs and was told that I ought to have left it in, so here it is some ... few months after the fact.  
> The title comes from a Shakira song. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

“There is something rather endearing in the fact that you think I would feel emasculated by the fact that you got it handed to you by a woman,” Hewlett said, returning with a bag of peas too thawed from his own usage to afford much comfort. Simcoe held the package against his eye with a pout of protest, feeling the condensation congress in his palm.

“You think it an argument in support of your so-said honour that you would hide behind a lady?” he chimed back with matched mockery.

“I certainly wasn’t about to stop her.”

Simcoe’s head throbbed. He attempted to alleviate his suffering by crushing the coolant harder against what he was certain had by now formed a contusion. He glanced at his rival - bandaged so that most of his bruising was concealed under gauze - doubtlessly applied with the attention he did not warrant and the affection he did little to earn. The comfort that he might have otherwise taken in visible evidence that Hewlett was in more physical anguish than he himself had ever been made to suffer veiled, Simcoe tried to hit him again in the only way he could with the two women whose graces he sought exchanging their own chatter and chastisement out on his balcony.

“This will reflect poorly upon me in the office,” he drolled. Hewlett was about to start working part time for little above the proposed national minimum wage explaining a model of the night sky to school children and stoners. Simcoe managed several hedge funds. He had an office. Hewlett, he smiled, would have a lockbox at best.

“Perhaps you ought to spend less time involving yourself in needless conflict and more considering the consequences oy your actions,” Hewlett replied briskly, missing the implication in Simcoe’s ire.

“Rich words coming from you, Oyster. Need I remind you that you explicitly asked for this?” he exaggerated as he gestured at where memory told him he had cracked the already hideous visage of the gargoyle perched beside him.

“I didn’t ask you to place my life in peril.”

“I clearly ought to have done more to that end.” He paused. The voices outsider grew lighter in the way that women’s did when they traded secrets and opinions they imagined qualified as such. Perhaps, Simcoe considered, it would serve him better to follow the example set by the fairer sex.

“I can’t believe you shared your unproven hypothesis with Anna,” he whispered. It came out as a hiss. Hewlett offered a half smile.

“I didn’t. She figured it out for herself, which should beg the question of what in your life is so fundamentally broken, John Graves, that everyone who knows and loves you is easily able to come to the same conclusion about your whereabouts on Tuesday evening?”

“Love?” Simcoe repeated. He did not trust the man knew the meaning of the word.

“Anna wanted to throw my clothes in the laundry, saw yours in there covered with blood and asked me exactly how hard I hit you - horrified, in disbelief. When I saw what she was looking at, I cursed your name for being so bloody careless with evidence. She read either my meaning or my mind, swore at me at great length whilst I explained the finer points of our history, ultimately then attempting to wash away your sins – and ah, perhaps my role in them- in a rather literal sense in your machine.”

“Did she?”

“We believe in you, and we would believe you if you would only … ah. That is,  I know - rather, I hope – there is a logical explanation for all of this. Why did you, did Mary -”

He tensed. They both did.

“How much did you say?” Simcoe asked before Hewlett permit himself to yield in his self-scrutiny. “You told Anna about Glasgow?”

“I told her everything I am legally able to disclose. She’s to be my wife, John. I would never knowingly expose her to threat,” Hewlett said in a tone that suggested apology.

Simcoe closed his eyes, shifting the bag of peas being cooked over the fire of his cheeks. He hated Hewlett continued to express a form of sorrow at the fact that Anna had chosen him, that he had chosen her. Sorry was insulting. It was a waste to try to make him see it as such. Simcoe hoped that this was simply another expression of the condensation Hewlett was given to by his nature and upbringing. He hoped his rival did not look upon his spoils with sadness.

“Ah, well that is to say, I told her what I initially did when I found you in the stables. I told her that I made an anonymous call to the Foreign Office during the investigation, that a few days later I saw you again in Edinburg and we were debriefed, having the same story we originally told police about Bucephalus recited to us as the official explanation. I apologised, naturally, that I could not say anymore and that it would not serve to inquire.”

“You named it?” Simcoe asked, bewildered.

“Come again?”

“The horse.”

Hewlett looked more confused than he had. He rubbed his temples. He rubbed away his fixed composure. “Of course I named him,” he scoffed. “I bought him afterwards at auction to save him from euthanasia.”

“So you could do it yourself?” Simcoe dropped the legumes and pointed two fingers at his temple.

Hewlett’s eyes widened as he slivered to the back of his stool.

“Christ!” he exclaimed, his dark eyes quickly settling into a narrowed glare. “Were you reading Equus at the time you were informed about that unfortunate incident? Loath though I am to shatter your queerly refined perceptions, it is not as though I got my jollies from shooting my best friend. If anything, you might check to see if some element of projection is not at play in that respect,” he spat. “What I’ve truly … what I have been struggling for months to understand since I first head of this exchange is how Marengo’s death every became the topic of your pillow talk. How _‘my brother shot his horse’_ ever – possibly – lead to ‘ _strip._ ’”

“In the same vain, how did _‘I blamed the near manslaughter of a parolee I originally thought my mate responsible for on a stupid animal’_ turn into your first time?” Simcoe retorted. He glanced out onto the balcony, at Mary Woodhull lighting a cigarette, at Anna Strong bending to block the wind. “Women crave darkness and danger. You should see the book Mary’s having me read. Right twisted shit, it is.”

“ _Pride and Prejudice_?” Hewlett asked sceptically.

“No. _Fifty Shades,_ ” he answered, certain the title would be lost on someone whose literary interest were excluded to European men who had died long before ideas of liberty and equality gained a voice in art, long before politics began to mirror these movements. “They – females, as a gender group- all get off on that sort of thing,” he tried to clarify. “Not … directly per se, but as an idea, an abstract.” As entertaining as it could be to watch Hewlett try to walk his way back from the clear classist sentiment he demonstrated by the passages he chose to quote every time the two of the discussed fiction at length, Simcoe wished the conversation to end there. He had no desire to explain bondage to a man who had been a virgin for all of his hours up to the last.

“That why you killed him? Arnold I mean.”

Simcoe suddenly longed to return to the topic of venereal exposition.

“I didn’t. Kill him,” he said shortly.

“So what happened?”

“I have – _honestly_ \- no bloody idea.”

“John.”

“You first then.”

“What?”

“Marengo,” he smiled, again miming a gunshot, this time pointed in Hewlett’s direction.

“Must we honestly do this?” Hewlett sighed, looking as though he had taken a hit. “Simcoe, I’m trying to help you and all you are trying is my patience, ah -perhaps my resolve.”

“I’ve long wondered why you did it.”

“You came up with your own explanation as you are want to do. Mine, I’m certain, would disappoint it,” Hewlett muttered, sinking into his shoulders. Simcoe felt his anger surface.

“This is why no one trusts you. Any discussion of intent and you go from vague to non-communicative. Why should I confirm or deny your assumptions of me when you won’t afford me the same curtesy? This is why we’ve never been friends, Hewlett. This is why you’ve never truly had any to speak of.”

“I beg to differ, my dear. We’ve never truly been friends because of your childish reaction to every possible stimulus. I am attempting – and failing – to recall a single incident when your emotions did not manifest themselves in a sulk or a violent tantrum.”

“Pots and kettles.”

“Fine. Fine,” Hewlett coughed in surrender as he stood, pacing for a moment before finding a place to stand that blocked Simcoe’s view of anything that might prove more interesting on its own merits. His body was eerily still, his face fidgeting in the way Simcoe’s fingers were want to.

Simcoe shifted, sliding his hands beneath his thighs. Hewlett’s remained folded in front of him, low on his torso in high political fashion. Simcoe tensed at this recognition. Hewlett seemed unconscious of it.

“Marengo threw the Duchess of Lennox during a foxhunt when she was visiting my family estate. She lost a child she had not known herself to be carrying as a result and as a symbol of good faith my sister sought to have the beast euthanized.” At this his voice broke. “I’d seen this happen before, they – the veterinary profession – call it humane though it is, in truth, anything but. The animal suffers for between two and five minutes as a violent seizure trigged by poison takes it. Understandably, I’d argue, after my own –then recent – experience saw me all but bedridden, unable to move half of my body, waiting in fear of the next attack to take what was left of me, I couldn’t expose my friend to the same suffering” he stammered, sniffed. “I couldn’t save him – it was societally impossible – though, please do note, I tried everything I could, being deemed heatless in the process, a mark I still carry. It was an accident. It was not as though my horse threw the duchess with the intent of ending her line. He was a horse. More than that, he was my friend, and I would be damned if I sat back and allowed him to suffer my fate.”

“So you shot him.”

“I took him apples and sugar cubes the morning he was set to be put down, pet him gently and sang him sweet songs before putting a pistol to his head. He died instantly. He didn’t suffer.”

“And neither did you.”

“Excuse me?” Hewlett blinked.

“You never do.”

“That was one of the most painful moments in my life. I am still haunted by the memory -”

“It doesn’t really alter my opinion of you, you know,” Simcoe interrupted dismissively. “Why I respected you so much when I was too young to know better. You do what you want; what you - and you alone - decide is best or will generate the best outcome. You suffer no decent and whilst you may – as only you could – feel like your actions fail to afford you a the adoration you think yourself entitled to for taking them, it isn’t as if you suffer any negative consequence either. That- with the whole Arnold thing, it is exactly what you are attempting here. I don’t want your help but I – and everyone, literally everyone I know and quite possible everyone I don’t as well - want, plot, plan and strive for even a fraction of your sort of ascendency. And you! It comes so naturally to you and you don’t even have the curtesy to admit it. But you get off on your own authority, don’t you? You always have.”

“I am made to suffer a generation of morons with misplaces morals,” Hewlett said to himself in disbelief. “This is why it doesn’t serve me to speak with you - or everyone you know, or everyone you don’t- on such matters. Everything I express leaves you with the same impression you developed otherwise. You twist contradictory evidence to support your own position which you came to on very little -”

“You left me to die,” Simcoe said flatly.

“Ah, yes well, to return your sentiment,” he spat, “I clearly ought to have done more to that end. Certainly would have spared me from a world of trouble.”

“You would seek and find it regardless.”

The laundry machine beeped to indicate it finished spinning. Hewlett turned from the counter and began to empty its contents, placing them in the neighbouring dryer. “Get your bedsheets and duvet, I’ll wash them too.”

“Burn them. I can’t have anything to remind me of your sick in my home. Anna should have taken better aim, given me a concussion to rid me of the memory of her moaning in sin. How did you – I want to stop thinking about it but I can’t fathom what sort of biochemical anomaly would begin to allow -”

“I haven’t taken my heart medication in a day’s time.”

“You clearly have so much to live for.”

“I didn’t expect to be out all night when I left Whitehall. I’ll be fine.”

“You always are, but that is not entirely what I meant. You had a lot to drink last night; the cider alone would have rendered me useless.”

“I have some experience with that aspect at least. Anyway, when I came to, I threw up your expired Coffee Mate and everything thing else that had ever been within me, including, one would assume, most of the unprocessed alcohol. Really, that I think on it, I have you to thank.”

“Think of how easily I could end your life before you speak.”

“Consider your own level of commitment to that very task before you do. Empty threats show your enemies where your weaknesses lie.”

Silence settled for a moment. Hewlett broke into a smile first.

“Are we good then?” Simcoe asked.

“No. No! We most certainly are not. I can’t well cover for you if I don’t know what I am dealing with.”

“I don’t know what happened to Arnold,” Simcoe repeated his honest refrain. “It is not, I didn’t black out in rage or anything like that. I remember what happened, only -”

“Then tell me what you remember,” Hewlett urged.

“You can’t keep doing this. One day you are going to lose.”

“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he agreed, “but that is less of an immediate concern.”


End file.
